The short answer: ask participants to create one or several award trophies with play dough that they’ll have to give in a role played award ceremony.
The problem
Celebrating successes is something that often is very dry in organizations when it doesn’t get totally forgotten. Sure we track KPI, OKRs and other milestones in a very administrative way but the emotion is often lost in the middle of the spreadsheet cells.
A lovely solution
In a workshop format where the goal was to reflect on past successes I’ve used a mix of play and role play to achieve this result.
Step one: Building awards through play with play dough
First participants receive play dough and have to build one or multiplie award trophies. Each trophy celebrates a specific project, a specific quality of a person, a specific milestone or challenge overcome. Each award should have:
a name: like the award of grit and perseverance.
a person or multiple people who will receive it.
Step two: celebrating the wins through role play of an award ceremony
Once the awards are ready one person after the other goes « on stage » and gives their award to the people who deserved it.
As in an award show the person who received the award can say a little thank you word to the people who made it possible for her to get that award.
The impact
I’m usually not a big fan of such ice breaker like activities. But this one felt pretty nice.
The fact that it was a bit playful really allows us to change the atmosphere from a business meeting to something more personal and emotional. There were even tears which is a good sign.
How to make it better
If I had to redo such a workshop activity I’d bring a few more elements to make the role play session more fun: hats, fake glasses, envelopes where the name of the winner can be put in, etc.